The Blogs of War

Today, our subject is the popular sentiment in favour of pacifism. People actually believe that all war is immoral, that pacifism is always preferable to war, and sanctions are and were the way to go. This comes up especially in discussions of the Iraq War.

Let’s reduce it to simplest terms: a woman is walking along a street, and a man jumps her from an alleyway with a knife and attempts to rape her. Is she really morally culpable? It is a moral failure; but it is not her moral failure.

So it can be in war: war can be in self-defense. Self-defense is a right and, indeed, to some extent an obligation.

And now, imagine a bystander who sees this. He is, as it happens, armed with a pistol. Would it be more moral to watch the man rape and then stab the woman to death, shrug, blame them both, and walk on, or to pull his pistol and tell the rapist to cease and desist?

In such a case, I submit there is a moral imperative to pull out the pistol; not to do so is morally depraved.

Having pulled the pistol, of course, there is also the real possibility that he will have to fire it—if, for example, the assailant refuses to desist or even lunges at him instead of desisting.

Then you are at war.

As in this example, it can often be immoral not to go to war. It can be rank cowardice. It can be pure selfishness.Sanctions as an alternative? In Iraq, for our example, sanctions did not work at all. We now know for certain Saddam was scamming the system: the Oil for Food scandal. Meantime, 500,000 Iraqis died “as a result of the sanctions”; by his own estimate.

Sanctions usually punish the innocent poor, rarely harm a corrupt leadership.

Hussein was fully capable of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction despite the sanctions, by all intelligence estimates. We do not know why he did not--if he did not.

At the time, sanctions were tried against Fascism too. They were the chief weapon of the good old League of Nations. That was the plan: sanction aggressors. So they sanctioned Mussolini as soon as he invaded Ethiopia.

It did not even slow him down. But it did prompt him to enter an alliance with Hitler.

They did not try it again. They had learned their lesson. Sanctions are counter-productive.

Someone once said generals are always perfectly prepared to fight the last war. They also generally forget all the lessons of the war before that.

Even if sanctions work, they harm the innocent, and rarely reduce the threat; but it is almost impossible to get sanctions to work. You need international unanimity. One or two well-positioned countries ignore the sanctions, and they are worse than meaningless; they only harm you, but not the target country. Plus, there is every incentive for someone to break the sanctions: any country doing so profits massively.

Given human nature, how often are sanctions likely to work?

Roughly never.

In Christian morality, there is a presumption against war, and war must be a last resort. But that is far from saying all war is immoral.

There were, you may recall, orders of Christian warrior monks whose charism included the obligation to fight: the Knights Templar, the Knights of St. John of Malta, the Lazars, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of Santiago. There are similar Buddhist orders: the oriental martial arts began as religious practice, and are still headquartered in the head temple of world Zen Buddhism: Shaolin. Monasteries in Japan and Korea traditionally have fighting monks charged with defending the temple, the religion, and, if need be, the nation.

When, in the New Testament, Jesus was called upon to criticize soldiers, he did not. Soldiery is an honourable profession. He said only, “soldiers, be content with your wages.” The New Testament, and Jesus, give a Roman officer, a centurion, as the model of proper piety. Catholics quote him every week at mass.

Hinduism is even more explicit. The main message of the Bhagavad Gita, in practice Hinduism’s central scripture, is the duty to go to war.

We do not like war; nobody likes war. War is very unpleasant thing for all involved. As a consequence, it is too easy to scapegoat it and those who, for moral reasons, do or must pursue it.Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, all have explicit doctrines of the “holy war,” of a war that is not just permissible, but a moral obligation.